The goal of the UCLA Training Program in Neuroendocrinology, Sex Differences, and Reproduction is to educate pre- and postdoctoral scholars in research, to prepare them for careers in scientific research and/or teaching. The Training Program is enhanced by the active participation of faculty members from diverse fields: genetics, molecular and cell biology, endocrinology, physiology, and behavioral science. The training faculty, members of the Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology (LNE), a research unit of the Brain Research Institute, are members of 11 UCLA departments. All faculty members are primarily or exclusively involved in basic research, but several are also physicians and thus bring a clinical perspective to the research of the group. A dominant characteristic of the LNE is active collaboration and interaction among the 12 independent research laboratories, at both the faculty and trainee levels, which considerably enriches the educational milieu for trainees. Trainees have free access to laboratories of all LNE faculty. This proposal requests funds to support 6 predoctoral and 3 postdoctoral scholars per year. Predoctoral students will be appointed for a period up to 4 years, and postdoctoral trainees for 2 years. Pre-doctoral trainees must be admitted to one of five Ph.D. programs Postdoctoral candidates apply directly to research mentors. The Training Program provides for weekly brown bag seminars, didactic graduate courses and seminars, the Charles Sawyer Distinguished Lectureship, instruction in ethical conduct of science and career skills, and for intensive mentoring of minority undergraduate students. The target fields of research include study of how the brain and gonads communicate with each other to control reproduction; how hormones affect the ability of the brain to respond to disease; and how hormones and sex chromosome genes produce sex differences in the brain and other organs that influences their basic function and susceptibility to disease. The training program will help educate the next generation of scientists who will perform research to provide information that influences how physicians conceptualize and treat specific diseases, especially those related to reproduction, and how they treat diseases differently in men and women. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]